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On a recent trip to Stroud I spotted a postie delivering letters to the Wy Wong takeaway, and since my mind works in mysterious ways I imagined that the white envelopes scattered across the mat were from dissatisfied customers answering that very question.

‘Because it wasn’t the weightwatchers version I asked for,’ might be one reply, or ‘because as always I was still hungry after eating it.’ Or simply, ‘because you forgot to put in the prawn crackers.’ That sort of thing.

Naturally, I jotted these thoughts in the Moleskine writer’s notebook that follows me around, its pages rich with wacky catering snippets – a source of writing inspiration only surpassed by people’s moronic mismanagement of mobiles in public.

A lot of material has come from Indian Restaurants – probably because I’m in them so often. The chicken madras in the Rice ’n Spice at Haywards Heath according to the menu contained ‘avid black pepper’. In the Bengal Lancer at Llanelli you could get a ‘potion of chips’ (spooky).The Bilash at Rugeley offered ‘King Prawn Roshuni – a pleasant dish of king prawns made by our chef,’ which sounded, well, really pleasant. When I hurried the order along at the Jalsagor in Hereford the manager said he’d ‘hasten the papadums in a minute.’ And in the Taste of India at Leominster the menu described chicken tikka as ‘tender pieces of lamb cooked in …’. I wondered if it might have been ‘torn’ chicken – torn, that is, between whether it was a chicken or a lamb. It got eaten, so we can’t ask it now.

Elsewhere, a sign in Tesco exhorted me to buy puddings: ‘Life’s Short – Eat Dessert First’. In the same store a man asked the shelf filler if they had any Camp coffee. ‘Ooooo, I’m not sure. Now let me see-ee.’ And in a lovely cafe called Quinns in Worcester the menu offered ‘a lovely large bowl of home-made soup, lovely salads, lovely old-fashioned puddings and orange squash served in a lovely plastic cup with a straw’. Lovely. I was, however, appalled to see 30p for a glass of tap water with ice and lemon at Nice Things cafe in Ledbury, a charge sensibly removed by new owners.

Further afield, I liked the English blackboard menu outside the Hotel Verol Restaurant, which included chicken breast with chips, chicken wings with chips – and chicken tights with chips, presumably a thirty denier Las Palmas speciality.

I’m sure there’s a chimp in here somewhere

And during a three-night stay in Bangkok I took a shine to a nearby fish restaurant – Kuang Seafood – which had numerous fish tanks fronting the street. Families and business people filled the room each evening, waiters brandishing huge trays of mouth-watering delicacies and chefs periodically lowering their nets into the bubbling homes of red snappers and catfish. In Thailand what we know as prawns are called shrimps; and tucked among the long list of shrimp dishes I found ‘Baked Chimp with salt’. I didn’t fancy the salt and opted instead for crab curry and fried rice with fish.

On the move, I particularly enjoyed the jolly Welsh trolley man on Arriva trains between Manchester and Cardiff. Happy in his work and determined to offer travellers a new experience, his operatic rendition of ‘Just One Cornetto’ lightened the atmosphere of a crowded carriage, as did his later promotion of sea serpents and snake venom in as deadpan a way as one might sell Walkers crisps or KitKats.

And on a bus near Gloucester I overheard a woman telling fellow travellers they should try a cafe in Herne Bay, Kent which sold ‘the best garlic bread in the world’. Okay – tomorrow perhaps.

I’m used to restaurants glossing their menus; outrageous descriptions are now so commonplace that I rarely bother noting them. A roadside Brewers Fayre listed ‘fresh, hand-battered, pole-and-line caught Cornish cod, served on a bed of chef’s chunky, crispy-dipped potato strips and topped with a jus of caper-infused mayo rich in mountain tarragon’. To you and me, fish and chips with tartar sauce. Even M&S gets in on the act with ‘handcrafted, British pork sausage rolls’. And I found a fine example at the Seven Stars pub in Ledbury: ‘complex, muscular yet graceful, with fine length and lovely maturity’. Not as I had imagined some sort of sex service, but a bottle of Bolinger for fifty quid. A stark contrast with the pundit on a TV wine tasting who glugged some red and got ‘a WVS clothing store’.

Only last week I found that a Weston-super-Mare seafront cafe had thoughtfully placed its menu on the outside wall.

But on Friday, channel-hopping before the showdown between Chinese, My Kun Chi Plei and North Korean, So Dark Dung in the Leeds International Piano Competition, I happened across Hollyoaks on Channel 4/7+1 OD.

I stuck with it to see what I’d been missing. Over the next half hour a gay trio, Brendan, Eoghan and Ste, exchanged longing looks and bitchy threats, and cafe owner Tony was extremely nice to customers as fiancée Cindy, to whom he’d been married before, was having it away in the cafe toilet with Rhys, whose girlfriend Jacqui McQueen was upstairs having her sixth baby in two years alongside sister Theresa having her fifth.

When that was all over, the entire cast attended the funeral of Lynsey (who’d been murdered earlier), except for Mercedes, who was in care and watched the hearse go by from an upstairs window in the psychiatric unit, cackling as she saw the funeral cortege blocked in the narrow street by a broken down car being beaten over the bonnet by its driver with a dead branch.

The whole episode was overlaid by a James Blunt loop, though I’m not sure if this was to match the mood or because the programme had been reinvented as Hollyoaks – the Musical since I was away.

Toying with the remote again, I found an episode of Emmerdale just starting on ITV2+1+8=11Plus. For a rural community there was a disappointing absence of livestock, but I decided to see it through. In the ten minutes before the ads Cain Dingle put a crowbar to every glass in the Woolpack, Georgia demonstrated why it’s never a good idea having mother to stay, and Debbie Dingle squared up to four other women saying,

‘You think I’m upset? You ain’t seen nothing yet.’

In the second half things warmed up. Flat-nosed Jimmy King rushed into the glassless Woolpack to say three bodies had been found in the landfill, followed by a stranger in a beanie hat claiming he’d struck gold in the sheepless hills at the edge of the village. Half the customers dashed off to the landfill, and the rest to the gold mine where they found a makeshift notice from David Cameron saying it had already been sequestered for the Big Society, but that they were welcome to look around. While they were up there, Sainsbury’s built a new superstore where the shop had been, Lisa Dingle browsed through the Bible to choose a name for her fifteenth child, due at 7.22, while Zak, who was standing at the window nonchalantly reading a letter saying the Dingles had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, screamed helplessly as a school bus tore past, clearly out of control, and embedded itself in the entrance to the gold mine, exploding on impact and trapping the would-be prospectors inside – a bold move by the producers since the episode was going out live to mark the programme’s hundred and twenty fifth year.

This was thirsty work. But making a cuppa before the Piano Competition was a mistake, if only because I didn’t switch to BBC4+SkyPlus+3 (where x=y) before I left the room. Instead, I found ITV2+1+8=11Plus had already tripped into Coronation Street, or Corrie as everyone now calls it, and I was teased into following for the next twenty five minutes.

In that time, Norris, dressed as a waitress, served Greek food at a theme night in Roy’s Rolls Cafe, and in the Rovers Return Tracy Barlow told seven different men that she was pregnant by them, whereupon they all gladly proposed only to have their worlds fall apart when she told them she was joking, while Ken and Deirdre sat looking old, and Lewis (typecast Nigel Havers) chatted up three Mancunian bar assistants with the telling line, ‘Does every woman in Manchester have an orange face?’ before going back to Audrey’s and taking her on the kitchen table.

The hiatus after the ads – when a group of old ladies with mauve hair and pacamacs on a Granada Studios Tour failed to hear the guide’s instruction to pretend they were extras, and not point umbrellas or make faces at the camera – was soon overcome by a camp guy in the factory ‘oohing and aahing’ like Kenny Everett, and Steve and Michelle dumping each other twice, leading to Steve taking out Sophie Webster for an evening that was going swimmingly until the infatuated girl stepped in front of a passing car, unaware that her garage-owning dad Kevin was at that very moment sat in a customer’s 4×4 ending it all and had only been saved when a Boeing 737 mistook the railway track for Manchester Airport runway and demolished the viaduct, the resonance from which dislodged the hose leading to his exhaust.

A nice extra touch to celebrate ninety nine years of the programme was having the cast and mauve-haired ladies seen at all times enjoying a Mr Whippy 99; no surprise that Cadbury’s were sponsoring the episode, which was being streamed live.

At last I was ready to relax with whatever was left of some quality piano playing. But just as I was switching over to BBC4+Skyplus+3 (where x=y) my front door flew open and Phil Mitchell barged in with a production team and six cast from East Enders.

‘Sorted,’ he said, blatantly dropping his ‘t’. ‘Nah shut it – right!’

‘Right,’ I whispered, closing the door as asked.

It seemed that to celebrate two hundred years of the programme, all week they’d been transmitting the East Enders Roadshow live on RedButtonDave+2, and my house had been randomly selected to host Friday’s episode. Once they’d covered my Ikea furnishings with grey tarpaulin, Phil threw Sharon across a small formica-top table in the centre of the living room with such force that, through a handily placed mike, you could hear the air rushing out of her like a collapsing balloon.

‘Is this what yer want, is it? Is this what yer want?’ he yelled.

‘No, Phil, no,’ she squealed.

‘Yer dad’d turn in his grave, yer slut,’ he said, polishing the table with her tangled, yellow hair.

I wasn’t sure exactly what she’d done, but it must have been bad to get such harsh treatment.

The staircase was a good vantage point for all three sets. In my kitchen, which had been darkened to camouflage the orange Le Creuset Ovenware, I could see Max Branning counting money at a second formica table.

I couldn’t see a monkey, but there was a lot of money. A few days later I discovered that as soon as he arrived, Max had sold a motor with a bad oil leak and no MOT to the elderly lady at number 5.

Meanwhile, in the small, spotlit gravel garden at the back, they’d thrown green netting over my choice pots, and forced the six Polish neighbours to hang around as unpaid extras.

‘You sure you got the right immigration papers, son?’ the producer had said when a skinny Pole objected. ‘It’d only take one phone call, yer know.’

As the cameras rolled, Ian Beale emerged from the shadows and head-butted Alfie Moon who was having a quiet fag.

‘Think it’s funny, do yer? Think it’s funny?’ he said, landing a blinding blow at the top of Alfie’s nose, with the Poles muttering away in the background.

‘Nah, but this is,’ said Alfie, pulling an eight inch blade from his back pocket and taking Ian out with two swift thrusts. ‘You ’ad it coming to yer,’ he said, as the camera zoomed in on him hiding the crimson-stained knife in my pink hollyhocks.

I was frightened by the chasm between their unsmiling world and my happy one. Only five minutes in, and my home was a battlefield. Powerless to respond to victims or perpetrators, and sensing the enormity of the social issues facing Walford, I felt myself being dragged lower and lower …

*

I was kept under observation in Hereford Hospital, but tests showed I’d not ingested enough paracetamol and dihydrocodeine to cause lasting damage. I thought it a bit harsh that they discharged me on the condition I never tried watching East Enders again. I mean, I hadn’t invited them in, and it was Max Branning who’d kindly called the ambulance when he spotted me swigging from the pill bottle. And after all, I had landed myself a cameo role in a live broadcast.

A few days later I watched So Dark Dung steal the show with a moody rendition of Tchaikovsy’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in a repeat showing of the Competition on Dave Really+1+7HD I Player Ja Vu. All the while my finger was twitching over the ITV1+5 button to check how many passers-by Cain Dingle had given a good seeing-to since my last visit. I resisted. But I can always go back in fifty years to catch up.